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Making connections

Music and video playback are both enhanced by a particularly fine and loud pair of built-in speakers and Dolby’s Digital Plus sound modification. Hook the A510 up to a good set of headphones or a decent dock and it makes a very competent music player.

AnTuTu and Sunspider results

Acer has built the A510 around a T30S Tegra 3 chipset with a quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz. Despite having a CPU dialled-back from the 1.5GHz speeds found in some tablets it still has more than enough raw power to run the latest generation of 3D games with perfect smoothness. So potential buyers shouldn’t be too concerned about it being obsolete this time next year.

To put some numbers to that statement the the AnTuTu benchmark app returned an average score of over 8,400 while the Sunspider browser speed test came in at a more than reasonable 1,745 using Chrome.

Acer's ring: ready for poking

Thanks to the Tegra 3 chip and Android 4.0, the A510 is both fast, easy and pleasant to use. Unlike some tablet makers Acer hasn’t messed about with Android, so the version here is very close to stock ICS with only a few minor design tweaks and the Acer Ring launcher which you can disable.

Acer has a decent reputation for rolling out updates, so I suspect Jelly Bean will bounce onto the A510 sooner rather than later, even though nothing has been officially announced at the time of writing.

Dead Trigger gets an outing

The old A500 had a full-sized USB port which sadly the A510 has done away with in favour of a micro USB socket. Asus does, however, include an adapter for attaching USB storage which is commendable, as is the fact that the A510 will power external hard drives. The A510 also takes a microSD card letting you add up to another 32GB of storage.

Powering the A510 is chunky 9,800mAh battery that Acer reckons is good for 12 hours of video playback. Looping a 720p video with the screen brightness at 80 per cent it only managed 8hrs 30mins but that’s still pretty good. Unless you hammer it like a recalcitrant nail, you shouldn’t need to look for a power socket more than once every two days.

It may appear a little unexciting, but it has storage and connections aplenty

Verdict

A 32GB A510 will set you back £130 more than a 16GB Nexus 7. For the extra you get a larger screen, twice the storage, an expansion slot, an HDMI port and that handy USB adapter. On the downside the screen isn’t as good as the latest AMOLED and IPS devices and it’s a bit plain and heavy. Still, until a Nexus 10 arrives – if it ever does – the Acer makes a lot of sense and represents good value for money. ®